"Thomas de Groot" <t.d### [at] internlDOTnet> wrote:
> "SharkD" <nomail@nomail> schreef in bericht
> news:web.4875c35533ed6cd5b319b3150@news.povray.org...
> >I aim to incorporate this into my Solar System include. The idea is that
> >the
> > amount of snowfall and sea level is changes with the planet's incidence
> > with
> > respect to the system sun. I trawled the web for some solar functions and
> > was
> > having difficulty implementing them when I last was working on the
> > project.
>
> It looks very promising indeed. Note that sea-level is not influenced by the
> planet's incidence, except maybe with planets having seas the size of ponds
> :-)
> But vegetation most certainly is of course.
>
> Thomas

Thanks for the compliments! Unfortunately, I did a render of several frames with
the globe spinning, and the texture doesn't look so good from the other side.
The pigment requires further tweaks. Doh!

What I meant in regards to the sea level dropping was that sea levels would
change as ice caps grew larger. You're right, it doesn't have anything to do
with the axial tilt, but I had also hoped to model other orbital
characteristics.

I have found a good formula on the Web in the form of a spreadsheet for
determining solar energy at a given point and time. I'm in the process of
replacing constants in the formula with variables so that the formula can be
generalized for any planet in any solar system. I'm very slow at it, though I
am progressing a bit at a time. The formula is not commented very well, so it's
not always clear what the source of the constants. For instance, the next step I
am tasked with is to determine which constant(s) originate from the eccentricity
of the Earth's elliptical orbit.

The other problem is that the formula produces a single value for a given
moment. What I require is the average value over a 24 hour period. It's been
many years since I studied calculus, and I forgot how to calculate the mean
value of a continuous function. I'm in the process of finding oput how to do
this.

Here is the spreadsheet in question:

http://www.sci.fi/~benefon/solenergy.xls

It is a bit sloppy. The version on my harddrive is cleaned up, reorganized and
commented so it's more clear. If you would care to assist please take a look at
it, or I could upload my latest version.

-Mike

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